Poetic Sweat

BILL T. JONES AND HIS COMPANY RETURN TO JACOB’S PILLOW

By Scott Edward Anderson 

(PAUL B. GOODE)

With every movement he makes, Bill T. Jones transcends the boundaries of dance, blending personal history, political activism, and raw emotion into performances that challenge and inspire. As a pioneering choreographer and director, Jones not only has redefined the art form but also has sparked conversations that continue to resonate long after the curtain falls. 

This summer, Jones brings his company, the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company, to Jacob’s Pillow for the first time since 2012. The company has a long history at the Pillow, having appeared ten times previously, beginning in 1989. They will perform three signature works over six performances from August 6 to 10 in the Ted Shawn Theatre, offering Berkshire audiences a rare opportunity to witness the evolution of one of America’s most influential dance companies. 

“I don’t know any other way to show up in the world without bringing all of myself to it,” says Jones, speaking from his home in Rockland County, New York. And for over four decades, that’s precisely what he’s done—bringing his full self, with all its complexity, vulnerability, and power, to every performance.

The Program: Past and Present Collide 

The company will present three works that span its history, providing a window into Jones’ artistic development and enduring concerns. 

Continuous Replay, one of the oldest pieces in the company repertoire, originated as a solo by Arnie Zane in the 1970s before evolving into a duet with Jones and finally an ensemble piece. Composed of 45 gestures developed by Zane, the movements repeat throughout the 30-minute performance, sometimes in unison, sometimes asynchronously. 

“The piece has a fascinating history,” says Janet Wong, associate artistic director, who has been with the company since 1996. “It shows how a simple sequence of movements can transform when performed by different bodies in different contexts over time.” 

D-Man in the Waters, created in 1989, was inspired by the death of company dancer Demian Acquavella from AIDS-related complications. The piece deals frankly with the AIDS crisis that devastated the arts community in the 1980s and ’90s. 

“It was made during a time when the world—especially the art and dance world, the downtown New York world—had lost so many people,” Wong explains. The work is one of the most athletically demanding in the repertoire, with dancers bursting onto stage, sometimes flying or sliding across it headfirst. 

The program also features an excerpt from Story/Time, which was performed in full at Jacob’s Pillow during the company’s last visit in 2012. Inspired by avant-garde composer John Cage’s chance-driven work Indeterminacy, the piece features Jones seated at a table on stage, reading from a randomized selection of his own stories while dancers perform in numbered squares around him. 

“Every performance will be different,” says Kyle Maude, the company’s producing director. “Bill will open his book, and he won’t know the order the stories will be in.” Composer Ted Coffey, who created the original score, will reunite with Jones for these performances. 

A Partnership in Life and Art 

One of the seminal figures of the post-modern dance world since the 1980s, Jones’ journey began far from the spotlight. Born in Bunnell, Florida, in 1952, the tenth of twelve children of agricultural workers, Jones and his family migrated up the Eastern Seaboard before settling in New York’s Finger Lakes Region. 

“I knew two kinds of sweat,” Jones has often said, “the sweat from working in the field and the sweat that came from athletics.” But when he discovered dance, he encountered what he calls “poetic sweat”— the sweat found in a dance studio. 

It was at SUNY Binghamton in 1971 that Jones met Arnie Zane, a photographer who would become his creative and life partner. Together, they co-founded American Dance Asylum in 1974 with Lois Welk and Jill Becker, experimenting with “contact improvisation,” a form of dance that involves sharing weight, maintaining physical contact, and supporting one another’s movements—techniques that would become hallmarks of Jones’ choreographic style. 

Jones and Zane formed their own company in 1982. From its earliest days, the company was known for its non-traditional performers, representing different body types, sizes, shapes, and colors. “We wanted to have a company that was not the world as it is,” says Jones, “but the world as we saw it.” 

As a mixed-race couple, Jones and Zane were a study in contrast: Jones, tall, Black, and athletic; Zane, short, white, and angular in his movements. Their duets often employed multimedia techniques—film projections, photography, spoken dialog—with a decidedly socio-political focus and an open display of their personal relationship. 

When Zane died of complications of AIDS in 1988, Jones continued their work and has retained his co-founder’s name for the company. “Long before there was any talk of gay marriage, I was determined to say the company was the child Arnie and I had together,” says Jones. 

Evolution and Legacy 

Now in its 43rd year, the company has its residence at New York Live Arts (NYLA), formerly the Dance Theater Workshop. Jones serves as artistic director of both the company and NYLA, creating a hub for experimental performance in Manhattan. 

“Having a strong artistic director who is constantly thinking, making, and exploring is one of the reasons we’ve been around so long,” Wong says. 

Over the years, Jones has expanded into opera and musical theater, including the Tony Award®-winning Fela!, about the life of African musician Fela Aníkúlápó Kuti. His collaborations have included work with artists ranging from artists Keith Haring and Jenny Holzer to jazz drummer Max Roach and novelist Toni Morrison. 

Shane Larson, who has been dancing with the company since 2011, sees his role as passing on the tradition. “Dance is really the only form that is passed through this performative tradition, body to body,” he says. “The only way you learn this material is literally by someone else showing you.” 

Jones is not content to simply preserve the past. Dancer Jacoby Pruitt, who joined the company in 2021, highlights what makes Jones special as a director: “Bill isn’t interested in the cookie-cutter, learn-the-steps-and-do-it-right approach. He is interested in making everything work for the individual performer.”

Looking Ahead

While the Jacob’s Pillow performances offer a retrospective glimpse of the company’s history, Jones continues to create new work addressing contemporary issues. Recent projects include Deep Blue Sea, featuring a deconstructed text from Martin Luther King Jr.’s I Have a Dream speech and Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. The piece was the victim of the pandemic when its work-in-progress performance at the Pillow was canceled in March 2020. It premiered in September 2021 at the Park Avenue Armory in New York. Jones’ People, Places, & Things, which explores issues like climate change, mental health, freedom of movement, and authoritarianism, will premiere at NYLA as part of its Home Season on May 15 to 24. 

“Who gets to move freely?” Jones asks in this new work. “What does it mean to be ‘illegal’? What do people do to actually find a better life?” It’s another example of Jones’ tapping into the zeitgeist—even before it becomes widely discussed. 

“Bill has this uncanny psychic quality,” Larson says. “He has this ability to tap into what’s about to happen in society.” 

Jones is now married to Bjorn Amelan, an artist and the creative director for the company who also lost a partner to AIDS, the fashion designer Patrick Kelly. The couple have been together since 1993, living in the downstate New York house that Jones purchased with Zane in 1980. 

“Our home is filled with the artwork and photographs of and by our former partners,” Jones says, describing three photos of Arnie in front of him, “one of him as a child, another showing him gender non-conforming at the beach, and a final one taken shortly before his death. And we have artwork from Patrick, in our highly aestheticized environment. They remain part of our story, just as Arnie’s name remains part of the company. The past informs the present, but it doesn’t define our future.” 

In 2010, Jones became a Kennedy Center honoree alongside Paul McCartney and Oprah Winfrey, and in the same year, he received the Pillow Award and a best choreography Tony Award® for Fela!. These honors recognize not just his artistic achievements but his role as a cultural force. 

As the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company prepares to take the stage at Jacob’s Pillow once again, audiences will witness not just dance performances but a living history—a testament to Jones’ enduring vision of dance as a vehicle for social commentary, personal expression, and transformative experience. “Ahead of the times” is a term that is often overused, but in the case of Bill T. Jones, it seems most appropriate, and it may very well be what keeps his work alive, his company thriving, and his legacy secured.

Jacob's Pillow's 93rd season kicks off on June 25 and runs through August 24, with the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company performing August 6-10 in the Ted Shawn Theatre. The festival will feature nine weeks of diverse performances, spanning indoor, outdoor, and digital experiences, and marks the grand opening of the technologically advanced Doris Duke Theatre. The 2025 season also celebrates significant milestones with Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater returning as a full company for the first time in 62 years and the Stephen Petronio Company presenting its 40th anniversary and final performance. For complete festival information, visit jacobspillow.org. Look for continued coverage in our upcoming summer issues.